‘Don’t we all?’ Luca offered a conciliatory laugh.

‘How soon until you horse-make this one, Luca?’

His smile grew fixed.

‘He’ll be back in work within the week.’ Ronnie was determined to keep the mood up. ‘His mind’s too busy to stand idle. And we want Luca to get his leg over something truly classy while he’s here, don’t we, Pax?’

Crossing her arms, Pax rolled her tongue round her teeth and said nothing, much as she had years ago at school when Ronnie had flirted with the headmaster on sports days. Those long drives to far-flung boarding schools for formal events when her children were teenagers had sometimes been her only way of maintaining contact, her letters unanswered, her rebellion as hard-wired as the stallion now in front of them.

Beck sprang forwards into his floating trot once more. He was addictive to watch. Ronnie remembered Paul Fuchs telling her that he was the most photogenic horse he’d ever stood.

‘We’ll have to get you back in the saddle too,’ she told Pax, certain the endorphins would do her good.

‘No you won’t.’

‘Nonsense. There’ll be plenty to ride out once Luca’s backed a few, plus poor Lester’s little string will need to be kept going.’

Pax shot her a don’t-go-there look from a lifetime ago. That tall, quiet teenager who had ridden so exquisitely, shyness inevitably shaken off when she was on a horse, and positively ebullient at high speed across country.

‘I’m happy enough riding everything,’ Luca offered easily. ‘It’s what you pay me for.’

‘Luca saves the day,’ muttered Pax, crossing her arms tighter and watching Beck spin a hundred and eighty degrees as fast as a polo pony.

For the first time it occurred to Ronnie that her daughter might have lost her nerve. She’d seen it happen enough times, especially when women had children, their mortality bound so tightly to motherhood. Riding might have kept Ronnie sane when her marriage ended, but her daughter was a much more urban fox. And yet, as every horse-mad, husband-hating Cotswold wife knew, horses were the perfect antidote to an unhappy home life.

‘Pax will be living on-site,’ she told Luca now, ignoring Pax’s mutters about it only being for a few days. ‘Which makes us the Compton Magna Stud team.’

‘God help us all,’ Pax sighed, then added to Luca, ‘That wasn’t blaspheming, by the way. It was a prayer.’

Luca’s fixed smile hardened beneath all the wild-man blond fur.

Ronnie felt another thud of disappointment, sensing the friction between them.

The phone began ringing, the bell peeling out across the yard.

‘That’s probably Mack.’ Pax stayed rooted to the spot for a moment, jaw clenched, then sprinted like a hare back up the hill.

‘Her husband.’ Ronnie turned to Luca, wondering how much he knew.

But he’d already wandered off to stand by the round pen, reaching up to hold its perimeter fencing with his fingers, forehead lowered against the chain link.

Within seconds, the stallion stopped circling and turned to him, head high. Saying nothing, Luca kept staring at the ground, Ronnie watching in surprise as the horse lowered his nose and stepped towards him almost without hesitation. Snorting in deep, inquisitive breaths, moments later his muzzle was against the wire mesh.